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The notion that this is somehow better on Windows is, from my experience, false. In fact if say the GUI freezes on Linux, which doesn't happen often with open-source GPU drivers for Intel/AMD, then I still at least have the option to switch to tty and restart the display server. On Windows the option seems to be a hard reset pretty much.

There's also many occasions where some .exe has simply "stopped working", or some system process takes over the CPU, with me none the wiser. If I install a 3rd party driver, there's some chance Windows will at some point attempt to replace it with an inferior version from its own driver database.

Then there's the whole update situation, which effectively takes control away from you, the computer owner, not to mention it could delete user data.

And yet, despite OS updates being forced upon you, application installation and updating is often still mostly an annoyingly manual process of browsing to some site, doing some sanity checks to make sure the site's legit, which your 'average user' is not doing, downloading the .exe and trying to avoid accidentally agreeing to have some toolbar installed in the process.

Add to that the telemetry, ads, nagging to use Edge before you switch etc. and am pretty sure that's not even most of it, as I luckily don't have to use Windows often.

> In fact if say the GUI freezes on Linux, which doesn't happen often with open-source GPU drivers for Intel/AMD, then I still at least have the option to switch to tty and restart the display server. On Windows the option seems to be a hard reset pretty much.

This reasoning... doesn't make sense. Say Linux freezes 1% of the time, and half that time you can go into the TTY and fix it; the other half of the time you can't do anything. Now say Windows freezes 0.001% of the time, but never provides any way to recover. Therefore you conclude Windows sucks and you prefer to be on Linux because Windows requires a hard reset whenever it freezes...?!

You are the one claiming that some particular Linux DE freezes more than Windows. If we're comparing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS running Unity under Xorg to Windows 7 then I don't agree at all; in my experience they're both rock solid.

I didn't claim such a thing? What I said was the parent needs to specify how frequently each one is freezing for them in the first place, which is what you're also saying. And I illustrated it by giving an example of how the freezing rate would make a difference.

> This reasoning... doesn't make sense. Say Linux freezes 1% of the time, and half that time you can go into the TTY and fix it; the other half of the time you can't do anything. Now say Windows freezes 0.001% of the time, but never provides any way to recover.

You're attacking a strawman, you specified the numbers and now say how they don't really make sense. I'd say Windows freezes are actually more frequent for me than on Linux, but maybe it's about even, (general slowdowns, ie "Not Responding", are certainly more frequent on Windows).

Wasn't that exactly my point? That you can't merely judge them based on the recovery mechanisms when the frequency of freezing on each one actually makes a huge difference?

> the frequency of freezing on each one actually makes a huge difference?

Of course it does. But you presumed that Windows freezes much less frequently, which is not accurate in my experience and indeed I don't specify numbers precisely because the difference isn't significant.

Then my entire point is that you need to say that! For me Linux freezes noticeably more often than Windows so hearing how I can recover more easily from it is cold comfort and makes no sense. For something like this you just can't assume people know how often your system freezes or otherwise all have the same experience as you.

> Then my entire point is that you need to say that!

Perhaps. I assumed it was implied.

I recently tried updating a Windows 8 system (planning to eventually get it to Windows 10). I let Windows Update try to "check for updates" for some hours before I eventually decided it looked like it was stuck (it gave no feedback either way, but people on the internet did claim it could take hours so I gave it a chance). On Googling, it seems like the accepted solution is to open an administrator command prompt in Safe Mode, paste in some weird-looking commands that seem to move files around in C:\Windows\system32 and stop and start services, manually download and install some KB13u319787wahtever.msi files and reboot a few times. It took me at least four tries to follow the instructions scraped from various forum replies, though I did eventually get it to start updating again. I haven't had so much work updating a system since I ran Arch Linux instead of Ubuntu =P

And then just try getting the built-in OpenSSH in Windows 10 installed and playing nicely with Linux – I'm still not sure it was worth the effort over just e-mailing files back and forth. I've had at least as much trouble with Windows as with Linux lately (but I don't do anything involving graphics).

The way I see it, the main reasons for using Windows over Linux are simply that there are still lots of programs written for Windows that aren't there on Linux, and although there may be good alternatives, they won't have the same community around them or training materials or third party tools and integrations. E.g. if you use Adobe CS, you can get lots of howtos on youtube, filters and plugins, help from friends etc. – if you try to switch to GIMP/Krita/Darktable, you're on your own and when you come across a cool-looking plugin you can no longer even try it out. And that feels bad.

By the way, what is iDrive? I've used varous linuces for nearly two decades and never heard of it.

I’ve been running Linux Debian Sid) as my primary OS for well over a decade and it’s great not to be an average user.

It has come so far over the years (back from when kernel / Xorg / drivers whatever) has to be compiled to get things to work. Now it mostly just works, although some effort is always required.

Over the years I have reduced my GUI usage to a minimum (it is still very useful for some types of operations) and it has made life simpler because there is a lot less variation in the CLI than than GUIs.

It can still be a pain (I have Nvidia card in my most recent laptop and it took some effort to get it working) but I have learned enough over the years that I was able to do it with only minimal Googling.

Once everything is set up it works and keeps working. It doesn’t slowly build up crap over the years, it doesn’t gradually work slower and slower. And if I took out my hard drive and put it in another machine it will probably just work, or at least get me to a shell where I can tweak a few things.

I can run the same OS on my desktop as I run in my servers and routers.

Being fluent in Linux has done wonders for my career in IT.

If I need some Windows apps for work I just run them in a VM with zero problems.

A big part of why things work so well of course is Debian - it is really good. As good a balance of freedom as you get in the Linux world.

So my experience is: if you are a basic user Linux is great, if you are an advanced user it is great. If you are an average user, not so great, but it’s hard to please everybody.

Have you used Arch Linux by chance? How would you compare Sid's stability to Arch?

I have not tried Arch.

Sid is quite stable but things will occasionally break (once or twice a year). Never so bad that it needed a rebuild (touch wood) but enough to be scary if you don't know enough to keep a cool head about it.

Latest example is some nice person breaking udev around Christmas causing it not to mount LVM partitions during boot. Luckily Linux does the right thing and drops you to an emergency shell and it's very easy to mount things by hand and resume boot. It did make my heart beat faster for a few minutes though! ;) This was the worst breakage for several years to give some perspective.

Also, best not to upgrade the (Sid) system for a few months after a new Stable release - that's when the floodgates (from Experimental) open and issues are often seen.

Overall, it is easily worth it for me to run Sid and get the latest software versions. I always run Stable on servers though.

I have infrequently fooled around with Linux only a handful of times in the last 15 years. I recently installed it on my laptop but was disheartened to see how much you still need the command line to do some very basic things.

Installing a program (not from the Ubuntu Software Center) and getting a launcher icon into the start-menu-equivalent took way too much time and Googling.

That’s true, but on the other hand, you have some 15000-30000 packages installable from software center that are guaranteed virus free, with automatic updates. (And they are liver and gratis to boot), so the average user rarely if never needs to go there.

> installable from software center that are guaranteed virus free

This is not true. Repos can, and have, been hijacked. Packages can and have had malicious code inserted. Hell, projects can and have accidentally accepted stealth backdoors in the guise of bug fixes or feature commits.

The repo system is not a panacea for security.

This is all true for any distribution system.

However, in addition to e.g. hacking the actual developer/distributor, on Windows, you have to be wary of a rogue versions on e.g. download.com that rank higher than the genuine one, and of google ads for trojaned VLCs and stuff.

It is no panacea, but it is very significantly better than the Windows world (and the Mac world outside of the app store)

Furthermore, modern snaps have limited privileges and file system views, so a backdoor is much less effective; I assume appimages and flatpaks have similar mechanisms (and if not, they should).

Situation is far from perfect, but it is about a billion time better than Windows whichever way you measure it.

>Installing a program (not from the Ubuntu Software Center) and getting a launcher icon took way too much time and Googling.

I don't understand this. You can open the "App Store" and search and download programs. If, for some inexplicable reason, you don't want to use the Software Center, you can open a terminal and type "apt install [name]".

Surely this is easier than installing a program on Windows. What exactly is your issue?

The issue is that installing something that's not in the official repositories and getting a functioning .desktop file set up for it can (in some cases) be a complete PITA if you don't already possess a reasonably detailed understanding of how the desktop launcher system works under the hood.

Do you have an example?

If you're at the point where you're downloading software that isn't in the repo, and their packages don't create a shortcut, then you're at the level where you can figure out how to do it yourself.

Technically competent users also value their time and effort though. I don't like complicated install processes; that's independent of whether I'm able to accomplish them or not.

I can only say I never had such a problem. I can count with my fingers the number of times I had to do that (Zotero, Nullpomino), and by "that" I mean "right-click > add desktop shortcut".

Installing a program on Windows that's not on the App store:

With installer:

  - Download installer
  - execute installer by double clicking on it

Without installer:

  - Download .exe
  - (Optional) Drag'n'drop .exe to some random folder
  - Right click .exe and select "Create desktop shortcut"

All of that is way more intuitive for a regular user than entering even one string of text in a terminal. People aren't trained to enter case-sensitive, exact-match strings of text in any input nowadays. Product designers are trying to eliminate the few times users are forced to do so (login forms, and again the difference with login is that the text is familiar to the user). The CLI feels too much like coding for regular users.

There's a significant piece of information omitted from those instructions: From where do you download the installer? How do you know the source you are downloading it from is the official one?

And there's the dreadful download pages with ads that look like download buttons, which are more obvious than the real one.

Also, don't forget to inspect every option of the installer to ensure you're not allowing the installation of bundled adware, toolbars, and search page hijackers. And these are sometimes bundled by the distributor.

Every mainstream Linux distro has an "app store"-like GUI application, where you click install and it installs. Click uninstall, and it uninstalls. You should try it - you'll be impressed.

I agree the download process is boring and risky, but that's a process users are familiar with. At no point does this make them think "that's all over my head" (even if they end up with malware).

I'm not saying the approach is superior in all points, I'm pointing out how much more intuitive it is for the average person.

And I was specifically talking about software that's not in a pre-installed repository. The different GUI app stores are pretty much equally easy to use.

Correction:

- Open browser - Type program name - Navigate maze of adware, crapware, and ad-ridden websites, download the stuff you want from "softpedia" or a similar dodgy website; somehow miraculously download the actual software instead of a virus. - Open .exe - Navigate installer

While in Ubuntu/Linux Mint:

- Open the software center - Type program name - Click Install

See?

This is a pretty biased representation. You're assuming that there either is no official website for the windows app or it cannot easily be found, and that the linux app is in the distro's software center.

You've presented the worst case scenario for windows and the best case scenario for linux.

A recent example of one of my installation experience for a certain application:

- Download tar.gz file from official website

- Move to appropriate installation folder

- Extract files from archive

- Look at readme contained within for further instructions

- Give execute permissions to the install script

- Execute install script

- Copy location of app launch script and create shortcut

- Download icon from google image search and add that to the shortcut so it looks right

A lot of steps required the googling how to do it and/or using the command line. Would normal users go through this? Would they even be able to in some cases? It's been claimed anybody who needs special software is already advanced enough to know how to do this. Ok, maybe, but I also don't want to have to, it's a pain.

Admittedly what I outlined is not the normal case of installing an app. Usually it is very easy with the software center. You can't hand wave away the shitty experience for anything that's not there though. Even with the technical knowledge to get it done, who wants to? Installing the same program for Windows would have required downloading the .exe from the official site and running it.

The different GUI app stores are pretty much equally easy to use. The problem is when you want something that's not in it.

On Linux Mint 19 with xfce desktop icons are absolutely no issue whatsoever. But who needs them anyway?

  - [Super Key]
  - First three letters of the program name
  - [Enter]

Boom!

Much faster.

This is pretty much exactly how it works on Windows.

Yep. I use Alfred on Mac (although spotlight hotkey also works), but a tap of windows button on Win 10. I almost never use the mouse or GUI to launch apps.

Whichever OS you use is the one that will give you the most problems, and once in a while problems that are difficult to fix that require the command line. When I was on Windows I had plenty of problems that were just as difficult to fix as you described. I usually leave Ubuntu running for weeks or months, rarely having to reboot and it's highly stable. I've never come even close to that with Windows.

I understand your point about going back to the command line in case of something going wrong. But for me that's a plus. Other systems are, to me, black boxes. If something goes wrong with them, there's less that you can do to fix them.

Now, I have a love-hate relationship with Ubuntu. Things kind of work, but they feel the pathological need of changing most of their tools each other version. The sad thing is that those changes don't provide any improvements, it's just the same but different.

I feel it's come a really long way. Maybe I'm just buying machines with supported graphics cards now, but I have not had any catastrophic failures since getting on 18.04.

That’s only 10 months...

Throwing another anecdote out there, I have an Arch install close to its 4th year of continuous operation without any major issues.

Counterpoint: I switched from Mac to Linux two years ago. I am comfortable with the command line, but it’s also great to just do what you wanna do. Clone a disk? Use dd. Forgot the command? Ten helpful tips in the first page of google results. (Actually I quit google too so DuckDuckGo). I’m not as happy with the polish, but 90% there and none of this “remind me again later” bull shit.

Thanks for your comment. It made me realise that OSes are like programming languages in regards to the tasks you can do with them easily.

I can think of different things that are easier in Linux than in any other os. But would you try to create a website in C++?

I believe that in both case there is a placebo effect: if you have to program in a language you don't like, you'll be unmotivated, bitch about it frequently etc. If you program in a language you like, it doesn't really matter how well it is fitted to the job, because you'll take shortcomings as challenges and sort of want to prove it can be done productively.

"The right tool for the right job" is only part of the story. Proficiency can go along way.

I installed Ubuntu 16.04 on my father's laptop (who is a really dumb user - love you dad) and we couldn't be happier

- Unity has one of the cleanest UI out there when you open no more than 5 applications

- he can't do any serious damage (he doesn't have admin permissions)

- that laptop has an Nvidia graphic card that runs smoothly with (unfortunately, Nvidia fuck you) proprietary drivers

Also, I have a desktop PC running Ubuntu with a 780ti and I can play at Dota max details with 120 fps (capped)

From your comment, it sounds like you are completely unfamiliar with how distros releases are organized. Learn about it, if you want to use Linux.

Ubuntu LTS is not a desktop oriented option, so surely it's quite behind in desktop usability. Especially when you aren't even using the latest one, but one version behind the latest LTS. That's really old. Get some up to date modern distro, select KDE and enjoy.

TL;DR: don't use server distros for the desktop use case.

LTS is Long Term Support, so I don't have to deal with every new bug. Upgrading always produces problems with ROS for the first year or so.

LTS is targeted for servers for a good reason. Desktop is going to be very much behind if you use it. Sure, some might be OK with it, but then they shouldn't complain about this very point. Otherwise it sounds like they didn't make an educated choice when using LTS.

The server editions are targeted at servers, the desktop LTS edition is targeted at desktops, specifically the desktops of people that don't want things breaking randomly, who don't need the latest and greatest and who don't like updating every 6 months.

Not Ubuntu at least. For instance Mesa in Ubuntu LTS is a lot behind the current release. So it is clearly not properly desktop oriented.

This isn't simply about "latest and greatest", but about timely bug fixes as well. Thinking that LTS provides stability can backfire, if you'll be stuck with the same bug for months and in the end won't have stability either.

Proper desktop oriented LTS updates some things frequently (backports idea).